Читать книгу Winston Churchill, A Biography - Rene Kraus - Страница 6

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Suddenly writing became very important to him. The young officer regarded the art of the pen not as a departure from the art of soldiering, but rather as its complement. Twenty-year-old Churchill was basking in the sunset of an intellectual age. Great gentlemen poured out their intellect (never uncivilly or intrusively close to genius), their mellowness and cultivation upon quite petty questions. Heads of foam bubbled up from Ciceronian periods. Over table conversations in which political enemies were the best of friends, you thought yourself almost in Athens, if not in Paris.

Winston Churchill was not yet able to produce essays or learned dissertations. He lacked the years at Oxford, and was beginning to feel it. So he resolutely wrote a vigorous short story, “Man Overboard.” The magazine where it appeared remarked in a note that the author was not the famous Winston Churchill—an American novelist now long past the peak of his fame—but the son of Lord Randolph Churchill. He was never to find time for a second attempt. All his life, by his own confession, he has remained a would-be author of short stories. But there was a novel in his head. It turned out to be a slender book on which he worked almost four years. At the end of the four years Savrola appeared, first in Macmillan’s Magazine, then in an American book edition, and finally as a book in England.

Savrola is remarkable not as a literary work, but as a youthful confession. Churchill gave it the sub-title, “The tale of a revolution in Laurania.” Laurania—which stands for some Ruritania—is a republic, and young Savrola revolutionizes it. In Savrola Winston Churchill is depicting himself. When he got home to London he set up in bachelor quarters that corresponded to a hair with the dwelling of his hero. He portrayed himself even down to the way he smoked a cigarette. Winston at twenty-one was immensely occupied with himself. Shortly before, he had made the naive confession: “I am not selfish. Self-centered? Maybe.”

Now he had a short breathing spell. In the spring of 1896 the regiment marched from Aldershot to Hounslow, where it awaited its departure to India. The officers of the Fourth Hussars were to remain for fourteen years in India. Six months of preparation—or really home furlough—was none too much for this. Meanwhile London was preparing for the Diamond Jubilee, to come the following year. It was a brilliant summer season, the first young Churchill had been through. His Aunt Lilian even invited him to a dinner for the Prince of Wales at her castle, Deepdene. It was an intimate little affair for fourteen people. But when Churchill missed his train, with the next one not leaving for an hour, the party had to sit down to table thirteen strong. Of this, however, His Royal Highness would have none. The Prince of Wales, punctual to the minute according to his habit, had appeared at eight-thirty. The young man in a hurry appeared breathlessly at twelve minutes to nine, having flung himself into evening dress in his train compartment, to the great astonishment of his fellow-travellers.

“Don’t they teach you to be punctual in your regiment, Winston?” asked the Prince of Wales in a very grave tone, looking at his friend Colonel Brabazon, the regimental commander.

Next day this was the talk of all London. And indeed what should they talk of? The dark shadows rising in South Africa were no table conversation, after all. The German Emperor, who had just sent off the famous Kruger telegram—another case of Prussian saber-rattling—could scarcely be mentioned in polite society at all any more.

In late autumn they set off for India. The troop-ship took twelve hundred men from Southampton to Bombay harbor in twenty-three days. It was a hot and fatiguing voyage. Churchill, going at his furious pace as always, could not wait to get ground under his feet again. He jumped ashore from the little boat that brought in the passengers so violently and unluckily that he altogether smashed his right shoulder, already injured by the childhood accident. It is unfortunately on record that he uttered most unchristian oaths. What was to become of his polo career in the Indian Army?

Of course polo was the main thing. It began every day at five in the afternoon. This was the hour that all the white officers in the brown empire eagerly awaited. Until eight o’clock dinner they raced hither and thither on their ponies, dripping sweat and oblivious of the world. The meal came at eight-thirty in the Casino. The regimental band played, and glasses clinked. Then they sat in the moonlight, smoking in silence until eleven. And so to bed.

This was the life for a gentleman in the Indian Army, even though most of the officers were never entirely free of money worries. The pay was fourteen shillings a day, plus three pounds a month for the maintenance of the horses. On this, however, each man had to maintain a little army of colored boys, and keep up an appearance no less lordly than that of His Excellency Lord Sandhurst, the General. Young Churchill could not go far on his five hundred pounds a year allowance. Besides, he was more than tired of accepting the money from his mother. He began to reflect.

Reflection carries one far afield. Mr. Churchill himself does not know how the philosopher in him happened to awake precisely in the camp of the Fourth Hussars in Bangalore, India. But it is a fact that it was here, in the midst of a group of carefree young officers, under a dark-blue southern sky, that a fierce intellectual hunger came upon him. Someone in the party mentioned the Socratic method, and suddenly the puzzle jumped at the young officer: this Socrates must have called into being something very explosive. Otherwise there could not have been a choice between his life and the life of the Athenian Executive. Why had his fame lasted through the ages? There was nothing about it in the Manual of Arms.

Winston Churchill wished that he had a Socrates of his own, a teacher to whom he could listen every day, and whom he could cross-question. Of course he never found one—not in Bangalore, nor anywhere else ever. He earned his own intellectual development by the sweat of his brow. Probably the most remarkable, if also the most neglected, drama in the man’s growth is the way in which he consolidated and buttressed his rich life of action by constant intellectual struggle with himself. He had no mental stimulation from outside, no partner to play ball with. The brilliant conversational artists of Oscar Wilde, the acutely arguing shadows of G. B. S. were not upon his stage. He had to build up his own ethics, his understanding of men and things, and finally the wisdom of his old age, from inside outward.

Probably his mother still understood him best. A brilliant social career in London had not dulled her native American perceptions. She had enjoyed only the fashionable education of a well-bred lady of the good old days. But when her son wrote from India that he wanted something to read she realized at once that he meant neither the Bibliothèque Rose nor yellow-backed railway novels. She remembered how Lord Randolph had positively lived in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He had been able to recite whole pages by heart. His own style was strongly under the influence of the historian.

She sent her son Dean Milman’s eight-volume edition. It was the first scholarly work that Winston Churchill ever devoured. His regret at the lack of a university education now became fully conscious. Nevertheless his inborn realism prevented him from overestimating one-sided intellectualism. The school system had not been good for him personally. If he were to write his own Republic, he said later, he would require sons to learn a trade at seventeen or eighteen, or to work in the fields or in a factory, with plenty of poetry, song, dancing, drill and gymnastics in their spare time, and only the superior and most worthy ones should enjoy the coveted privilege of higher education, which would thus no longer be cheapened. This sounds very much like Platonic idealism. (Winston Churchill, who has never learned any more Greek than the alphabet, is fundamentally a Hellenic spirit.)

He plunged into Plato’s Republic and the Politics of Aristotle, edited by Dr. Welldon, his headmaster at Harrow. He studied Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin. Philosophy led him to religion. The trifling conversations of the officers’ mess took on a deeper meaning. The young gentlemen, living here in (no doubt very comfortable) banishment, all asked, each in his own time, what was the meaning of it all. Was there a survival after death? Had we ever been here before? Would we meet again beyond? Did some higher providence care for the world, or were things just drifting on somehow?

Religious visionaries were something that the Hussars’ camp at Bangalore produced but seldom. In the English army people agreed that what counted was to try one’s best to live an honorable life, do one’s duty, be faithful to friends and kind to the weak and poor. Honor, fairness, and tolerance, not denomination, were important.

At church parade Lieutenant Churchill sometimes would march to the Roman Catholic church, sometimes to the Protestant. It made little difference to him, although he came of a family that had always suspected the Pope of standing behind the Fenians. Not too many years before, Grandfather, the Duke of Marlborough, had written to Winston’s father: “Your aunt who is with us now is most unhappy. For I fear she is a Roman Catholic at heart and does not like to say so. If this be true it would be much better for her to declare her mind, and then, of course, however we might be grieved, the matter would never be alluded to in conversation.”

This atmosphere of well-bred, philanthropic intolerance was the one Churchill had been bred to. In Harrow they trained him to be a patient churchgoer. In India he began to ask questions, to doubt. This doubt was strengthened by books—The Martyrdom of Man, by Winwood Read, Lecky’s Rise and Influence of Rationalism and History of European Morals—and above all by the skepticism of the great Gibbon. He was on his way to becoming an atheist of the sort that was springing up like weeds at the turn of the century. But coming for the first time under the fire of the Indian rebels, he asked his Maker for special protection after all, and he was very grateful to the Lord for bringing him back safe and sound to tea at camp.

The oftener and the more closely perils encircled Churchill—and from now on they would be repeated ever more frequently—the more his rationalistic arrogance evaporated. As for everything else in his life, he had also to work for his own faith. And once again we see his wonderful growing: belief in fairness and punctiliousness turning into faith in Providence, from which all fair play springs. When Winston Churchill defends the Square Deal today, he is the champion not merely of the Empire alone. He feels himself wholly impregnated by his timeless mission; he is a warrior of God.

He did not realize all this himself in those days. In his first year of Indian service he regarded himself as above all a polo champion. The tournament for the Golconda Cup at Hyderabad took place six weeks after the arrival of the 4th Hussars. In the first round the 4th Hussars’ team encountered the representatives of the famous Golconda Brigade, the bodyguard of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The Golcondas were the dead-sure winners of the tournament. All Hyderabad was gathered around the field. A review of the entire British garrison preceded the match. The elephants saluted by raising their trunks as they paraded past the polo teams. A vast concourse of Indian spectators formed a thoroughly expert audience. All of colonial society, from the Viceroy to the last white man, was in attendance. Everyone felt sorry for the 4th Hussars, who would have the misfortune to be put out of the tournament after the very first match.

The team of the 4th Hussars, with Lieutenant Churchill at center, first beat the Golconda killers nine to three, then all the other teams in rapid succession. Awaking from the intoxication of victory, Churchill remembered that he could scarcely play polo at all, because he had a broken right shoulder.

The hot season began. Now came three months’ summer furlough in England. On the boat Churchill made the acquaintance of Colonel Ian Hamilton, twenty years his senior. Here developed the first of those lifelong friendships that were to bind Winston Churchill with men so much older than himself. Odd how the veterans regarded the young man in a hurry as their equal. From now on Ian Hamilton was to accompany Churchill in all his roamings. Years later, when England regarded him as an apostate for going over from the Conservative to the Liberal Party, Ian Hamilton was to be one of the few diehard fire-eaters who stood up for him. “He will come back. His colour is true blue” (the Conservative color), “none of these modern synthetic dyes.” As they were sailing through the Red Sea in 1897, and passionately arguing about the new Graeco-Turkish conflict, neither of them knew that a ne’er-do-well village boy in the Austrian frontier community of Braunau am Inn was just committing his first pocket-pickings. Forty years later Ian Hamilton was to call on the sneak thief—an arrived man by now—and, returning, to tell his friend Winston: “I can’t see what you have against this man Hitler. He’s wonderful, he’s charming. He is a great man, incapable of lying, and he wants nothing but peace.” Of course when General Hamilton made this acute analysis he was, it must be admitted, past eighty years old.

There is no furlough from world events. Scarcely had Churchill arrived to breathe the gentle air and tread the green lawns before he read in the paper that the Pathan tribesmen on the Indian frontier were in revolt, and that a Field Force of three brigades under Sir Bindon Blood was to go out after them. Sir Bindon Blood, past ninety, died last year. During his lifetime he bore the name of “The Father of the British Army.” Young Churchill had already met him at Deepdene, his Aunt Lilian’s house; of course he had immediately wrung from the old warrior a promise to take him along when it should really mean serious action—as serious, that is, as these ridiculous little campaigns that Churchill hoped to spend his life at could ever be.

From the green lawns of Goodwood he went to the next train. He got a connecting vessel at once. Before reporting to Sir Bindon he found opportunity to get hired by the Allahabad Pioneer, a leading English-language newspaper in India, as a war correspondent. His mother meanwhile arranged in London for his reports to appear also in the Daily Telegraph (then still a popular penny paper, not the semi-official organ it is today), again at five pounds per article.

Churchill was a reporter with journalism in his blood. He made friends with Major Deane, an officer of the India Intelligence Service, and went with this wily politician in uniform to visit the rebellious tribal leaders, several of whom proved to be not altogether averse from taking bribes. As a result he was better and more quickly informed of many occurrences at the scene of war than his own General Staff. His reports regularly scooped the official army reports of General Sir Bindon Blood.

Nor can it be said that he was a bashful reporter. In the Pioneer we read, from his own pen: “The courage and the resolution of Lieutenant Winston Churchill, 4th Hussars, the correspondent of the Pioneer newspaper with the force, who made himself useful at critical moments ...”

He did not hide his light under a bushel, but neither did he exaggerate. Colonel Ian Hamilton records: “Churchill was out all day, stalking the enemy snipers, or relieving some picket whose position seemed to open an opportunity for bloodshed. At night he wrote copiously.”

The first days of the Indian campaign introduced a new element into Churchill’s life—whiskey. He himself had begun in the brandy-and-soda era. His father and model would have turned away in disgust if anyone had offered him the new “smoky-tasting” drink. At Sandhurst and Aldershot drunkenness was regarded as unworthy of the dignity of an officer. Of course they were not prohibitionists. Prohibitionists and drunkards alike were considered contemptible weaklings. And the drinking of whiskey was the first step on the downward path.

Hard days in the field in India changed all that. Whiskey did not taste of smoke at all now, but of encouragement. And courage was going to be needed. Churchill realized it as he put over his shoulder the lanyard of a fallen friend whose death he had seen the day before.

On the march to the Mamund country Churchill came under fire. The wild Mamunds, a tribe utterly pestilential in their cruelty, attacked the British forces. “If you want to see a fight,” Sir Bindon Blood remarked to his young friend, “you may ride back and join Jeffrey’s.” Of course Churchill put spurs to his horse. He came up with the foremost advance guard of the Bengal Lancers. It was their task to clear the valley completely of the enemy. While all this was going on under a constant hail of bullets, the infantry pushed forward from the rear. They were to storm the mountainside, and to smoke out the rebel villages up above. Churchill turned over his pony to his boy, and scrambled up the cliffs with the infantry, sweating in the murderous Indian midday heat, not without worry because the Sandhurst teaching about “dispersion of forces” was still fresh in his mind, and pushed always further and further forward by his irrepressible delight in battle.

When they had mounted the slope the forest above came alive. An enemy rifle blazed behind every rock. The wild men rushed down from the trees, flinging themselves upon the Sikh infantry. Barbarian banners flapped in the faces of the intruders. Swords flashed through the air. From the mountain slopes in the background an army of apes, swinging from tree to tree, sprang at the English troops. No, those were not apes. Those were the Pathan swordsmen, their reserves now coming to the assault.

It was a hand-to-hand combat. Churchill, who as an officer of course carried no gun, borrowed his Sikh boy’s rifle. Methodically he cleared the terrain around him. Ten, eleven, twelve bullets hit the mark.

The hoarse bellowing of the Pathans made communication among the English troops impossible. They broke up into small groups. Churchill, turning around for a second, saw beside him a face streaming with blood, a man whose right eye had been cut out by a barbaric knife. The wounded were the gravest worry. On the Indian front, just as today on the German, it was better not to leave them behind. It was a matter of honor with the enemy to mutilate wounded Englishmen fearfully.

Consequently Churchill was trying to drag the wounded man down the slope. His group withdrew. They had stumbled but a few steps downhill when twenty or thirty wild figures blocked their retreat. The Sikh who was carrying the wounded man dropped, shot through the head. His companion, the regimental adjutant, was also felled. Four men struggled to carry him away. A knot of wild men assaulted them. Their leader cut the dead officer across the face with his sword—four, five times.

Now there was but one thing in Churchill’s mind; he had been fencing champion of his school. He would fight it out with the Pathan chief, man to man. In a moment of strange calm that came upon him amidst the hellish uproar he drew his long cavalry sword. But the savage had already given way by twenty paces. Then, from among his native warriors, he hurled a great stone at Churchill. It missed.

The Sikhs had retreated. The young lieutenant stood alone against the bestial horde. He thrust his sword back into the scabbard. Here only the revolver was of any use. At that each bullet must find its man, and he must have opportunity to reload several times. He had no chance whatever to get out alive.

He pulled the trigger—and the revolver balked. He squeezed a second, a third time. Whether he was firing now he could not tell. Pandemonium had broken loose. The long-haired Sikhs had returned to cut their lieutenant free. He borrowed a rifle again, and this time he aimed straight, with an easy hand, although his breath was whistling and his heart beating wildly. He fired thirty or forty rounds, now at a range of from eighty to a hundred and twenty yards. There was no telling whether each bullet went home. But, by Jove, each one was meant to kill.

In his book The Malakand Field Force—unfortunately now long out of print—he describes this scene calmly and dispassionately. The book, published in two volumes, gives a complete description of the three years he served in India, almost all the time amid severe fighting.

He recounts the adventures of Mamund Valley, which was finally purged of the wild men. But every single village that had to be cleaned out cost the lives of two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers. Military honor, even the young Churchill considered, is a cruel sport. Always in the thick of it himself, urged by a demonic pugnacity, he early became a pacifist by conviction. Nothing less than the life of his nation and the freedom of mankind could bring him voluntarily to say Yes to a war.

The second half of his Indian adventures took place on the celebrated Tirah expedition. Churchill was transferred to the 31st Punjab Infantry Regiment, which was so decimated by earlier battles that except for the Colonel there were only three white officers left alive. Even so it was unusual for a cavalry officer, and a celebrated polo champion at that, to get into the infantry. A few of his fellow-officers laughed. But Churchill paid no attention. He cared nothing for the finer distinctions of the brass hats. He thought the good soldier was the one who fought where help was needed. And so he served successively on three continents (after having tasted blood on a fourth, in the Western Hemisphere), in the following regiments: 4th Hussars, 31st Punjab Infantry, 21st Lancers, the South African Light Horse, the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, the 2d Grenadier Guards, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and lastly the Oxfordshire Artillery.

Churchill remembered with pleasure his service with the dark-skinned Punjabs. They were obviously glad to fight under a white officer, and when fighting they watched him carefully to see how things were going. As long as the officer was smiling, they were cheerful. At Tirah they grinned uninterruptedly, for Winston Churchill’s smile never faded from his face, now burnt a dark red. He cheered his brown boys on through the rain of bullets.

Meanwhile, however, the gentlemen in his regular garrison at Bangalore decided he had had “furlough” enough, and summoned him back to his old regiment. He had now to do his regular routine duty, autumn maneuvers and all, popping off blank cartridges in sham fights while two thousand miles away the bullets among which he had been commanding his soldiers a fortnight before were still pattering.

There was but one authority before whom the generals of the Indian Army trembled—his beautiful Mamma in London. Here was one American mother who never dreamed of not letting her boy go to war. She personally besieged Lord Wolseley and Lord, later Field-Marshal, Roberts to bring her son back to the front.

Lord Roberts expressed his regrets in a polite letter: Winston had already been in the Malakand Field Force. Accordingly he had no moral right to join the Tirah Field Force. Others wanted their chance too.

Mother and son were deeply disappointed. But just at ebb-tide, then as always, Winston Churchill developed unexampled energy. He used his ten days of Christmas furlough to present himself before the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, at Calcutta. As if His Lordship had known that life would soon bring him into much closer contact with this young man, he granted the request, and arranged for a new assignment at the front. Churchill became adjutant to the brilliant commander Sir William Lockhart.

Nevertheless the feeling in India was not favorable to Churchill. His book, which had just appeared, had enjoyed too noisy a success. After all, it was the first success of his life. Though the reviewers did revel in the numerous typographical errors, they could not help feeling the force of the descriptions, of the dramatic presentation, and above all the shrewd, penetrating remarks and observations.

Perhaps the remarks were a shade too penetrating. It was not merely an account of military events. It was full of advice about all kinds of things. It discussed frontier policy, even conscription at home, and it lectured the government of India. Most of the remarks are definitely sane and wise. The reforms that Churchill proposed were in fact carried out to a great extent in the course of time. All in all, the future statesman and war lord announced himself quite plainly in the book.

To Colonel Blimp, however, it was the composition of a subaltern who patted Viceroys and Field-Marshals on the head. Especially the author’s sympathy for the savages was sharply condemned. Why, had they not come close to butchering the man himself on countless occasions? And then this youngster talked of their innate conceptions of honor and their wholly understandable realism!